#327: Aisha Tyler — How to Use Pain, Comedy, and Practice for Creativity

Aisha Tyler (@aishatyler on Twitter, Instagram, and Vimeo) is an award-winning director, actor, comedian, bestselling author, podcaster, and activist. She’s amazing. If you enjoyed my episodes with Brandon Stanton, Debbie Millman, or Adam Robinson, among others, you will love this one.Whether you do any type of creative work, want to be too complex to categorize, or want to overcome rejection and beat the odds, this one has something for you.Aisha voices superspy Lana Kane on F/X's Emmy award-winning animated comedy series Archer, which won four back-to-back Television Critics' Choice Awards. She is a regular on the hit CBS show Criminal Minds, now in its 13th season, for which she has also directed. Aisha continues to host the CW's hit improv show, Whose Line Is It Anyway, and she is launching a line of bottled cocktails she created, Courage + Stone, in Summer of 2018.Aisha was a co-host for seven seasons of CBS's Emmy-winning daytime show The Talk, which she departed in September 2017 to focus more on acting and directing. She is also well-remembered for her character arc on Friends, and she was the first African-American to have a long-standing role on the show. Her feature film debut, the thriller AXIS, premiered 2017, and the won the Outstanding Achievement in Feature Filmmaking award at the 2017 Newport Beach Film Festival, then had a theatrical run at Arclight Hollywood, Landmark NYC and Alamo Drafthouse, Austin, Texas. A San Francisco native, Aisha graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Government and Environmental Policy. An avid gamer and passionate advocate (and occasional adversary) of the gaming community, Aisha's voice can be heard in the video games Halo: Reach, Gears of War 3, and Watch Dogs. Aisha is a bourbon and hard rock fan, a snowboarder, and a sci-fi obsessive.Enjoy!This episode is brought to you by Teeter. Inversion therapy, which uses gravity and your own body weight to decompress the spine or relieve pressure on the discs and surrounding nerves, seems to help with a whole slew of conditions. And just as a general maintenance program, it's one of my favorite things to do.Since 1981, more than three million people have put their trust in Teeter inversion tables for relief, and it's the only inversion table brand that's been both safety-certified by Underwriters Laboratories (UL) and registered with the FDA as a class one medical device. For a limited time, my listeners can get the Teeter inversion table with bonus accessories and a free pair of gravity boots — a savings of over $148 — by going to Teeter.com/Tim!This episode is also brought to you by LegalZoom. I've used this service for many of my businesses, as have quite a few of the icons on this podcast such as Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted for everything from setting up wills, proper trademark searches, forming LLCs, setting up non-profits, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates.LegalZoom is not a law firm, but it does have a network of independent attorneys available in most states who can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews, and otherwise help you run your business with complete transparency and up-front pricing. 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